Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Hoarders' Salvation or Nightmare?

While I don't strive to necessarily be "first" or "unique" with my postings, I've never really like being part of the "me too" crowd. That is, throwing up a post about a topic that several other bloggers have been recently posting about. You know, like DDO's recent expansion, "Mists of Ravenloft". Which is one reason you've not seen a specific post from me about the expansion. But don't let that fool you into believing it's because I don't like the expansion; au contraire, mes amies - I do like it. A lot.

For one thing, it now gives me a third decent option for heroic sagas. By "decent" I mean a saga with not too many quests to run. With the addition on the "Mists" (heroic) saga, there are now a total of five heroic sagas available: Honor of the Huntsilver; In the Wastes of Gianthold; Perils of Cormyr; The Pirates of Thunder Sea; and (as mentioned) the new, Mists of Ravenloft. But "Honor" and "Perils" have 16 and 24 quests, respectively which for me is just too many quests, even if most of them do overlap (15 out of the 16 quests in "Honor" are also required for "Perils). But the quest levels (10 are levels 18/19) are just a bit out of my range at the moment, which makes them too difficult at this stage to run, anyway. But "Mists" has 12 quests, ranging from quest levels 10-12, so "decent". (And for completeness, the other two have 10 quests, each.)

But the new saga is not the main topic of this post. No, the main reason of this post is the new sentient weapons available for epic/legendary toons (levels 20+). Specifically, how one raises the sentient jewel - the very heart of the sentient weapon - level, which grants additional filigree slots at certain "sentient XP" steps (up to a current maximum of seven slots at 60,000+ total sentient XP).

"Sentient XP" is grated by having the sentient jewel consume named items. But I think it must first be slotted into a weapon, before you can feed the jewel. The amount of XP gained depends on the Minimum Level (ML) of the named item: items of ML1-20 give 1xML as XP, ML21-27 items give 5xML, and ML28+ give 10xML XP. No matter how you slice it, that is a lot of named items that must be sacrificed.

However, not all named items can be consumed. I recently tried to feed a named item that was also tagged as a "starter" item (namely, the starter version of the "Black Wolfskin Belt") and it was rejected. I assume the non-starter version would be consumed, but I didn't have one at the time to verify (but it would make sense). I understand the reason behind this - one could simply roll-up a temporary, Vet 1, 2, or 3 (when Vet 3 is available) toon, grab the BtA named items, throw them in the shared bank, delete, and then repeat the process ad nausea to acquire a plethora of named items to feed sentient jewels. There may be other named item restrictions, but if there are, I don't know about them.

Still, named items are not typically abundant (though lower level named items do appear more frequently). However, certain quest-chains to guarantee named items - not necessarily every time*, but several do guarantee several named items to choose from every 3rd completion of the chain.

Now, I know of many players - myself included - that tend to hold on to named items, even if they will never** be used...probably. So I imagine there are many, many, many shared bank/character bank spaces filled with named items all throughout DDO. So as a hoarder, do you use the named items currently "cluttering" up bank/inventory space and finally free-up those spaces by feeding them to your sentient jewel? Or do you go into melt-down because you *have* to feed named items to the sentient jewel in order to level it up but you're inner self still wants to keep every named item you run across?

For me (and many others I know), it's the former. But then, I don't consider myself a full-fledged hoarder, either. Though I will say that hours-upon-hours of playing (text-based, originally) adventure computer games have taught me to pick-up everything and never destroy anything...unless you absolutely have to††.

But I can see some people actually stressing out over the fact that they'll have to sacrifice their precious items *if* they want to level-up their sentient weapon(s).

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* Two exceptions are the Delera's and Threnal chains, which do guarantee the "voice" and "mantel", respectively, to be listed after every chain completion. Which is one reason why if after completing the chain, you see another named item you want other than the voice or mantle, TAKE IT! Then just re-run the chain to get the voice/mantle as they will always be listed.

** I have never rolled-up a Warforged toon; I do own the Bladeforged iconic, but not the regular Warforged race. So docents, for the most part, are mostly worthless to me. Although, I do have an artificer, which has the 'homunculus†' (aka arty-dog) and that can use a docent, so...never say "never".